No money, all those kids, floating on foreign shores and of course, he comes up with a twenty-some-room Andalusian farmhouse overlooking the Mediterranean. I don't know how he does it; guess it's a guardian angel squatting in his backpack. I never even got a chance to say I told you so. He was going to work it out.

We toured the house. Twenty-some spacious rooms but only four and a half of them furnished. A beautiful house, three-foot-thick white walls, handmade clay tiled floors, immense wood burning fireplaces, inside shutters, outside shutters, heavy, carved, dark wood double doors of chestnut and oak, hand-hewn antique beams. A gracious house. Outside a verdant garden: olive and almond and fig trees and evergreens, even a mulberry tree. A path going down to the sea lined on both sides with tall growth poplar trees gave the house its name, La Chopera, The Poplar Grove.

There was a splendidly-proportioned large circular tower room for my library I guess, if we ever got shelves and books to fill them. Gino immediately claimed the tower's second floor for his studio in the round. It had magnificent views of the gardens, fields and the now deep-blue Mediterranean, of the sunrises and the many tiered high mountains with their ever-changing gradations of gray at each sunset.